


Sixteen to Eighteen Standard Years

by Triscribe



Series: What-If Star Wars AUs [13]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, CT-5385 | Tup Lives, Child Soldiers, Emotional Hurt, Escape Pod, Imperial Propaganda (Star Wars), Mentioned Ahsoka Tano, Mentioned Anakin Skywalker, Mentioned CT-21-0408 | CT-1409 | Echo, Mentioned CT-27-5555 | ARC-5555 | Fives, Minor Injuries, Order 66 Happened Differently (Star Wars), Post-Finale, Waiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:28:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29610120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triscribe/pseuds/Triscribe
Summary: The stormie bristled, trying for a fierce expression. “I’m a member of his Majesty’s Imperial Forces, so you’d just better mind your tongue, clone!”“Your hand’s shaking,” Tup pointed out.Jaw working silently for a moment, the kid grasped the blaster with their other hand to steady it. “Shut up!”He should’ve felt worried. Scared, even. But Tup just glanced at the little puddle of vomit, frowning thoughtfully. He remembered Umbara, and the firing squad made up of him and his squadmates.This isn’t right.
Series: What-If Star Wars AUs [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1788598
Comments: 6
Kudos: 85





	Sixteen to Eighteen Standard Years

Tup woke up to the sound of retching.

At first, his mind took him back to Kamino, when the cadets who felt they needed to prove themselves pushed through an extra lap or three and wound up doubled over in the nearest ‘fresher. But then he registered the hard metal beneath his bare head, the warm-slickness of blood on his face, and memories came flooding back.

_“Imperial cruiser just dropped out of hyperspace!”_

_“Fighters incoming!”_

_“We can’t get out of their tractor beam - everyone get to the escape pods, I’ll set the engines to detonate-”_

_“Boarders at the topside airlock!”_

An unpleasant odor reached Tup’s nose, but by the lack of extra splatter sounds he figured the other person had cycled through to dry heaving. Moving slowly, he pushed himself upright, one hand coming up to gingerly press at his head. His fingers found a bump easily enough, sore to the touch. A long gash just above his ear accounted for the blood - and of course, his hair tie had come loose, letting the long dark strands hang loose. Grimacing at the thought of all the dried blood he’d need to wash out later, Tup finally looked up to study his surroundings.

And promptly froze.

Because the other person doing the vomiting was in _stormtrooper_ armor.

Alarmed, and unable to immediately locate his blaster, Tup wracked his brains for an explanation - and came up blank. He could recall up to the point of ducking enemy fire as he reached the bank of escape pods, and then... nothing.

So. As Rex would say, time to do some fast thinking.

Judging by the bit of freckled skin he could see, Tup figured his pod-buddy wasn’t a former brother, one of the few remaining bio-chipped clones in Palpatine’s armies. Nat-born stormtroopers didn’t have anywhere near as much training as the Kamino-raised vod’e, so even in the limited space of the escape pod, his hand to hand combat skills would theoretically triumph-

Except the stormtrooper still had their own blaster close to hand, and beyond their knees Tup could just spy his own as well. That stacked the odds against him.

The thought occurred that he should attack while the other soldier continued to heave, but that just... didn’t sit right with Tup. Left too much of a _good soldiers follow orders_ churn in his gut. Plan B, then.

“Are you okay?” He asked.

The stormie jerked upright, flailed, and wound up collapsing back onto their rear. It would’ve been just funny enough to make Tup laugh - except that even in the midst of their surprise, his opponent still managed to seize and lift their blaster to point straight at him.

“You s-stay over there!” They demanded. Tup blinked, then squinted. The pod’s red lighting made it a little harder to tell, but paired with the high-pitched voice, he realized the other’s round face looked far too young to be in stormtrooper armor.

“Osik,” he muttered. “You’re just a kid.”

The stormie bristled, trying for a fierce expression. “I’m a member of his Majesty’s Imperial Forces, so you’d just better mind your tongue, clone!”

“Your hand’s shaking,” Tup pointed out.

Jaw working silently for a moment, the kid grasped the blaster with their other hand to steady it. “Shut up!”

He should’ve felt worried. Scared, even. But Tup just glanced at the little puddle of vomit, frowning thoughtfully. He remembered Umbara, and the firing squad made up of him and his squadmates. _This isn’t right._

“You tried to shoot me while I was out cold,” he said, not bothering to phrase it as a question. “But couldn’t bring yourself to do it.”

“I said shut-”

“Shut up, I know, I know. But my head’s still ringing, kid, and it’s a little hard to think straight without talking out loud right now.” A blatant, utter lie. Hardcase would be proud of his seamless delivery. “I’m Tup. What’s your name?”

The stormie stared at him, blaster lowering ever so slightly. “I... AB-1791.”

Tup looked up sharply. “You’re a clone?”

“No! I’m a _stormtrooper_ \- recruited from his Majesty’s Child Centers to serve the Empire that saved my life!” They looked... not proud, really, but trying to be proud, as the recited words left their mouth.

There was something terribly ironic, that Tup, bio-engineered, tube-grown, and trained on Kamino for ten years for the sole purpose of being a soldier, felt his own stomach rebel at the implications. “...you were an orphan.”

Suspicious, the stormie nodded.

“You were a _child,_ in an _orphanage_ \- and they gave you a _number.”_ Tup couldn’t help but scowl. “Do you even know what your family named you?”

“That- that’s not important! It’s a great honor to receive-”

“No. It’s a _number_ that’s only meant to make you expendable. Names are important. Names make you a _person._ When you’re just a number, no one blinks at sending you off to die.” Shaking hands shook worse. Tup pressed his advantage. “Do you know how old you are?”

They hesitated, but answered. “I’m in the sixteen to eighteen standard years age group.”

Tup dropped his head into his hands, only barely avoiding his still-tender bump.

 _“Stop that!_ Stop acting like there’s- there’s-”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” the man muttered into his fingers, before looking up to meet scared brown eyes. “But there’s a lot wrong with the system that _made_ you.” Repeating to a nat-born the same thing he and his brothers once needed to learn felt beyond strange, but Tup knew it needed to be said.

The kid faltered a bit. “There’s nothing wrong with the Empire. It’s your Alliance that’s causing upheaval in the galaxy, we’re just trying to _fix_ it!”

“And that’s why the Empire’s got so few adult recruits it needs to steal kids from orphanages to fill the ranks? Right.”

They opened their mouth to argue further... and then closed it again. Tup sighed.

“Look, Aybee,” he tried. “I’ve been there. _Every single one of my brothers_ has been there. You grow up thinking you’re serving a higher purpose, that your life and your death will be necessary in service to a greater movement. But the people who tell you those things want to keep you unthinking, compliant, easier to mold into interchangeable cogs. Those people are _liars.”_

The stormie’s arms sagged, until their blaster rested on the floor. “...but...”

Tup leaned forward where he sat. _“Liars,_ Aybee. And the biggest one of all sits on his throne made from the corpses of soldiers and civilians alike, not giving the slightest thought to all the lives he’s still wiping out in order to hold onto power. Real leaders aren’t like that. They’re on the ground, fighting alongside us, risking their own lives in order to show that they hold us in equal standing with themselves.”

The kid’s lost expression hardened a bit at that. “Leaders like your Jedi? They’ve murdered _thousands-”_

“And saved millions,” Tup countered. “They fight those who want to hurt needlessly, and they grieve for every life lost under their watch. Will your commanders care if they have to put your number on a list of casualties?”

They looked away.

“I’m not saying these things to be cruel. I just want you to _think.”_

They stayed silent for a long while, as Tup dragged out a medkit to try and clean himself up, and the stormie kept their blaster vaguely aimed in his direction. As expected, the dried blood made his hair stiff to the touch, but concentrated effort with the sanitary wipes and emergency comb tucked into his utility belt cleared away more than Tup expected. Soon enough, he got out a new hair tie, and wrapped up the dark mass in a bun only slightly messier than usual.

His unfriendly companion sent him an odd look. “...why’s it so long?”

Tup shrugged. “I like it that way. And as long as it doesn’t interfere with my helmet, no one minds.”

“Oh.”

The awkward silence dragged on, until Tup spoke up again. “So, what happened?” At the kid’s confused frown, he elaborated. “I don’t remember anything past running for the escape pods - how’d we both end up in here?”

Underneath the freckles, pale skin went bright red, as the stormie dropped their gaze to mumble something.

“Pardon?”

“The hull breached,” they elaborated, barely any louder. “We were ordered to prevent the escape pods from jettisoning into the asteroid field. You were the only one still standing outside yours, shooting, and I- I charged, to try and knock you down so my squad could get in, but- our Star Destroyer, they never... they didn’t stop firing.”

“Probably aiming at the pods already deployed,” Tup grimaced. He refused to let himself panic over Dogma and the shinies he’d been looking after, or Fives and Echo and their little boy Sixer. “And because your squad didn’t succeed, they probably figured you hadn’t made it to that part of the ship, or-” He paused, but from the kid’s frown they obviously knew he’d been about to say _or they didn’t care._

“The explosion threw me forward,” the stormie went on. “We collided, and for whatever stars-damned reason, you pulled me into the pod and sealed it before we could be sucked back out. I don’t- I’m not sure what happened when we launched, but there was an alarm siren and the whole pod shook, and when I looked up you were on the floor.”

“...had I taken my helmet off? Or did you do that?”

The kid hesitated before answering. “I did. To- to see if you were alive. If I had- had to shoot-”

“I get it,” Tup interrupted softly. “Don’t want to waste perfectly good plasma on a corpse.”

A weak laugh came out of the shaking stormie. “R-right. Would come out of my- my paycheck.”

Snorting, Tup closed up the medkit and pushed it over. “Exactly. Here - bacta’s all yours, if you need anything patched up.” He frowned when the kid blinked; once, twice, and then the tears started welling up.

“Why are you- _acting_ like this?” The stormie demanded, voice thick with distress. “You’re a _clone,_ you shouldn’t- shouldn’t _care_ about anyone except other clones or your Jedi-”

“But we’re people, too,” Tup answered. “And that means we get to care about other lifeforms, no matter how logical it is or not.”

Barely holding back the tears in their eyes, the kid just shook their head repeatedly. One plastoid-booted foot kicked the medkit away, as they curled around their blaster like it was a child’s stuffed toy.

“...Aybee,” Tup managed to say. “Can I come sit next to you? No tricks, I promise.”

“W-why?”

“Because the only way I know how to make someone who’s about to cry feel better is to hug them, and I can’t do that from over here.”

The kid made a choking noise, before picking their head back up to glare at him. _“No._ You st-stay over th-there.”

He sighed, but didn’t argue.

In due time, the sniffling stopped, and the few tears that did manage to leak were hastily wiped away. The kid shifted to resettle in a slightly different spot, and though they once again held the blaster properly, it didn’t return to pointing at Tup’s chest, which he considered to be progress.

“So. Ten credits says my family finds us first.”

The stormie frowned. “What?”

“Ten credits,” Tup repeated. “You wanna bet higher that the Empire gets us instead?”

“We’re in the middle of an _asteroid field.”_

“What, Imperial search and rescue teams can’t navigate through some hunks of rock?”

The kid looked at him like he was an idiot. “There’s no point. Either we drift out the other side and they pick us up, or we don’t and we die.”

Tup glanced up at the escape pod’s window, despite it being too soot smeared to actually let him see outside. “What I’m hearing is that you _don’t_ want to make a bet on your side finding us before mine does.”

“Yours won’t come either,” the kid stubbornly insisted.

“Sure they will. How about this instead - I’ll put ten credits on General Skywalker getting here first, you can have General Tano beating him in.” Answered only by a wide-eyed stare, Tup sighed. “Look, Aybee, me and the others on that ship your Empire attacked? We _aren’t_ expendable. There will be people coming to find us, whether they sneak under that Destroyer’s nose to do it or bring enough back-up to chase the Imps off.”

The kid’s eyes widened even further. “I- I’m going to be executed.”

That statement startled Tup right out of the bemused attitude he’d gained. “What? _No!_ You’re a kid! We don’t kill kids!”

 _“Yes you do!”_ The stormie’s breathing picked up at an alarming rate. “AA-1788 and her squadron went to Onderon, and the Jedi there killed _all of them!_ There’s a _vid-recording of it!”_ When he saw the blaster once again becoming a makeshift tooka doll, Tup forewent asking permission and lunged. The kid flinched, scrambling back, but he knocked the weapon out of their hands before any shots went off. With the advantage of surprise and speed, Tup managed to get the kid’s arms pinned, their back to his chest, head tucked underneath his chin.

The stormie squirmed against him, tried to kick, to bite, to no avail. All due credit, it took one hell of an effort to maintain his grip on shiny smooth armor. Eventually, however, the kid fell still, and Tup felt it safe enough to try speaking.

“No one’s going to kill you,” he promised. “I’m sorry about your friend, and her unit, and anyone else you’ve lost. When my people come they _aren’t_ going to hurt you, I swear, and we’ll make sure the entire Republic Alliance knows about the kids being turned into stormtroopers. It won’t stop the fighting, but from now on, we can try to offer the option to surrender before anyone dies.”

A full-body shudder rattled the armor plates held in his grip, and Tup heard another sniffle. With no other response forthcoming, he slowly shifted to a position sitting back against the wall, tugging the stormie along with him. They both remained silent for a bit, faint shadows passing in front of the blackened window as asteroids drifted by.

“Hey,” Tup later spoke. “You want to hear a story?”

The kid huffed. “Alliance propaganda?”

“Nah, nothing like that. No Jedi, no troopers. No war, even.”

“There’s always war,” came a faint whisper. Tup got the impression he wasn’t meant to have heard it, so he ignored the comment and went on.

“A few of us heard different versions of it in one system or another, and we’ve tweaked a few details to make it feel more- well, not _real,_ obviously, but true in its own way. You wanna hear it?”

“...you’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you.”

“Yep.” He chuckled at the kid’s long-suffering sigh - maybe there’d be hope for them yet. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...”


End file.
